Wiped my memory - a warning would have been nice, Korg...

[phreakymonkey]

A cautionary tale for those of you new to the devices...

So I joined this band recently, that fuses sort of standard powerpop with some wacky electronics, and was given what was to be my instrument, the EMX-1. I've had it for a few months now and was getting pretty comfortable with it. I use it live and program the electronics for our songs on it. I had just more or less finished what would be our first song together, and delightedly presented it to the others at our most recent band meeting. Everyone seemed to feel good about it, and just in time for our next show. Then, at the meeting, somebody pulled out the SmartMedia card that the guy I had replaced had backed up all the previous song data on. Maybe you see where I'm going with this.

I popped the card in, and hit shift-13.

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CardMenu
Load

I looked at the other options: "SavAll" (nope, don't want to overwrite the data), "Format" (don't want to delete it either), "Delete" (see previous). I hit 13 again.

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Load
All

The only other option is "1Ptrn," and we wanted to hear the whole songs, so 13 again.

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[SAVENAME]
LdFile

There was only one file on the card, so 13 again.

Now I was presented with the final selection that would haunt me for some time to come. The innocuous looking

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Sure?

Yup. I mean, what could I hurt? I assumed that, like most every other product in the world that uses removable media, I was loading it into temporary memory.

I think it is quite telling that I played with it for several minutes before any of us realized what had been done. It was when they asked me to play the song I'd finished that the light begin to dawn.

"There's no eject or unmount option. Am I supposed to just pull it out?"

After a minute of looking, I gave up and tugged it out.

"Huh, weird. It's still there. How do I get back to the main memory?"

I turned it off and on again. My heart sank.

"Oh no..."

There followed much wailing.

I suppose it is fortunate that we did it on the first song, instead of, say, an album's worth of material down the line, but that doesn't change the fact that it was weeks of work down the toilet. Luckily, we had already recorded a sort of beta version of the song before, so I can piece most of it back together using that and what I can remember of the other parts, but it will take a long time. I also had the settings for each of the songs we play live set up as patterns, which are also gone.

Immediately after I got home, I tore through the manual looking for the line that would have alerted me to how this thing worked, but there was nothing to be found. It warns you that if you load a single pattern, it won't be saved to memory, but not a bloody word about the dangers of "Load:All." Where was the text popping up in the process that would ask me "Do you really want to overwrite everything on your onboard memory? It may suck very hard for you..." They reduced this down to "Sure?", which just does not cut it for me.

Be careful, kids...

[nemmo]

I just can say PWNED.

[paul_courville]

If I had a dollar for everytime i did something similiar to this...
It will take time, but you will recover and write something even better.
Remember: Only the data was erased not your talent.
Paul Courville a.k.a. Cyberdude

www.cyberdudeproductions.com